Mobile broadcast TV has been developed actively in the recent years, and so as the related technologies. With the gradual integration of heterogeneous networks, the convergence service becomes a very important trend. Mobile broadcast TV service is an important service era of the convergence service. In the convergence service, pay service plays an important role of the mobile broadcast TV service.
Digital Video Broadcast (DVB) consortium has been actively promoting mobile broadcast service in the recent years. Mobile TV on broadcasting network is an important approach for mobile services. In DVB, the standard of mobile broadcast TV is defined in DVB-H. At present, mobile broadcast TV has several campuses under active development, which include DVB-H, MediaFLO, ISDB-T, T-DMB.
Mobile broadcast TV is a development which may provide a convergence service of broadcast and telecommunication services. To provide mobile service, DVB-H defines additional features in physical layer from existing terrestrial DVB-T, where one of the features is to process handoff/handover issue. In addition, DVB-H also applies Internet Protocol (IP) to provide multimedia service.
In the terrestrial TV, an illegal TV station may easily use the same frequency to forge an illegal TV station which causes legal TV a grave operation loss. An attacker may also easily and cheaply use the same frequency to forge an illegal TV station or transmitter attacking a legal TV station. Also, without proper and secure authentication mechanism, an impersonation subscriber may steal a service. These security problems also exist in the pay service for mobile broadcast TV. Therefore, a mutual authentication mechanism for pay service of mobile broadcast TV becomes an important mechanism.
Anonymity is an important privacy issue in protecting user information and identification to prevent abuse by unauthorized users. With the actively development of broadcast TV and the convergence of heterogeneous networks, diverse services such as pay-TV, Impulse Pay-Per-View (IPPV), VOD, multimedia services, on-line game, may be provided to the subscribers. The anonymous authentication of mobile broadcast TV also becomes an important security issue. Anonymous identity-based cryptography has been widely applied to network and communication systems.
Authentication is a security mechanism used to identify the subscribers and the legal users. The early pay TV uses a conditional access system (CAS) to operate the service access management through subscriber authentication. In a pay TV system, CAS manages a large amount of authorized subscribers. The CAS employs the entitlement message to manage the authorized subscribers and services. The CAS handle the security of the entitlement and authentication by the entitlement message allocated to subscribers. The entitlement message carries access parameters with authentication information in order to manage the service access.
Because the bandwidth of broadcast is very precious, the efficient utilization of bandwidth to achieve the broadcast efficiency in pay-TV or near-VOD is an important job. In general, the following scenarios may occur in pay-TV. A plurality of users request the same service and the same service arrives at the head end system of CAS in a short period of time or simultaneously. In order to achieve the broadcast efficiency, the service scheduling and program scheduling are necessary and important tasks. Also, efficient use of bandwidth is also important in the service or program scheduling. To achieve efficient handling, the CAS needs to schedule the entitlement messages for the arriving requests.
The early CAS uses a public key cryptosystem or symmetric key cryptosystem to manage the service security. The CAS using the public key cryptosystem uses digital signatures to authenticate the subscribers. The CAS using the symmetric key cryptosystem, such as DES or AES, uses shared secret keys to authenticate the subscribers, but fails to reach the non-repudiation protection. However, in the situation of multiple service operations, the symmetric key technique may suffer insecure risk and fail to reach the non-repudiation protection.
For example, Song et. al. disclosed an E-ticket scheme for pay-TV systems. The E-ticket scheme may achieve the privacy and non-repudiation protection for pay-TV systems. The scheme is based on RSA public key cryptography, and employs an encrypted authentication message with digital signature to execute mutual authentication. This scheme also supports anonymity. Lee et. al. also disclosed related schemes. These techniques all use one-to-one authentication message delivery without proposing an effective measure for the scenario when a plurality of users requesting the same service which arrives at the CAS head end system simultaneously or in a short period of time.
In recent years, the elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) becomes more efficient in same security level, or called key length, than the integer factoring scheme. The pairing technology applied to elliptic curve research has also been disclosed, such as Weil Pairing, Tate Pairing, and so on. These pairing technologies may be applied to encryption, digital signature and authenticated key agreement, and so on. For example, the bilinear pairing technology is applied to the supersingular elliptic curve, bilinear Diffe-Hellman problem, and discrete logarithm problem.
The following describes the technical terminologies and definitions used in ECC. Mathematically, ECC is defined on the finite algebraic structure. To simplify the description, the elliptic curve in the following description is defined on the finite algebraic structure Fp, where characteristic p>3. Elliptic curve E defined on Fp may be simplified as the following form: E: y2=x3+ax+b, where a·bεFp(p>3), and 4a3+27b2≠0. The points on elliptic curve E form a group and the group includes a point at infinity, depicted as O. According to the group definition, any point P of elliptic curve E must satisfy P+(−P)=O. The elliptic curve group is an additive group.
Assume that line l passes two different points P and Q of elliptic curve E. Line l and elliptic curve E intersects at a third point −R, and P+Q=R. If line l is tangent to elliptic curve E, P+P=2P. Generally, point multiplication is defined as Q=kP, where k is an integer. A famous problem, called elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem (ECDLP), is that it is difficult to find an integer k so that Q=kP for a given point Q on elliptic curve E. Many security technologies based on ECC are proposed according to ECDLP. The bilinear pairing technique is a nice scheme to realize the identity-based cryptography. The bilinear pairing technology is a mapping to map a subgroup of points on an elliptic curve to subgroup of elements in a finite field.